11 March was the 160th anniversary of one of the most fascinating events to transpire on Talossan soil: the rescue of Joshua Glover.

The United States in the 1840s and 1850s were torn by the debate over slavery. An increasingly strident abolitionist movement in the northern states had led to the creation of the Underground Railroad: an informal network of anti-slavery advocates and free blacks who would harbor escaped slaves from the South and help them travel to safer areas (often Canada). In response to the growing problem of escaping slaves, in 1850 slaveholder interests secured the passage of the federal Fugitive Slave Act. This law established a streamlined process for slaveholders to secure the capture and return of slaves who escaped to another state, prohibited alleged escaped slaves from testifying in their own defense in the summary court proceedings authorised to approve such return, and imposed criminal penalties on anyone who assisted an escaped slave or obstructed or hindered a slavecatcher.
Against this background, enter Joshua Glover. Born into slavery in Missouri probably around 1810, he was sold to a new master, Benammi Garland, in 1849. Glover escaped from Garland’s farm in St. Louis in the spring of 1852, and made his way north to Racine, Wisconsin, where found employment in a sawmill. But less than two years later, Garland got word of his former slave’s location, and filed the necessary affidavits in a Missouri court to prove his ownership of the absconder. Accompanied by two deputy U.S. Marshals, he went to Racine, where the slave hunters surprised Glover at a game of cards in his little cabin near the mill on the evening of 10 March 1854. Glover was quickly beaten into submission, handcuffed, and thrown into a wagon. Knowing Racine to be a hotbed of abolitionist activity and sympathetic to Glover, his captors decided to take him to Milwaukee, presumably hoping to avoid public attention. Riding through the night, they reached Milwaukee at dawn on Saturday the 11th. Glover was locked in the Milwaukee county jail.

Milwaukee's jail then was in what is now Cathedral Square, formerly Courthouse Square, a block of land in Fiova Province (formerly Buffonia canton of Maricopa Province) donated to the city by Solomon Juneau in 1836. Juneau and a colleague paid for the construction of Milwaukee's first courthouse in that year, and county buildings and a jail were added over the next decade or so. Here Glover was placed to wait out the weekend. On Monday morning, Garland would seek a summary hearing before a federal judge who, under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act, could be expected to rubber-stamp the affidavit Garland had brought from Missouri and send Glover back into bondage.
The people of Racine were already in an uproar over Glover's capture. Over a thousand people gathered in that city's Haymarket Square--the largest public assembly to have occurred in Racine by that time--and decided to send a delegation of about 100 men to Milwaukee by boat. But wires are faster than boats, and long before the Racine men arrived at Talossa's docks, Milwaukee newspaper editor Sherman Booth received a message from the mayor of Racine by telegraph, informing him of Joshua Glover's predicament.

Sherman Booth had moved to Milwaukee a few years prior, bringing with him his abolitionist paper, The Wisconsin Free Democrat (formerly The Wisconsin Freeman). He had been introduced to the abolitionist cause as a student at Yale University, when he was hired to teach English to the African mutineers of the slave ship Amistad. In Milwaukee, since the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, his paper had been advocating for the state government to guarantee escaped slaves the rights of habeas corpus and trial by jury.

Upon receiving this word from Racine, Booth sprung into action. He rode up and down the streets of the East Side on horseback, calling the people to assemble. A crowd of over a thousand Milwaukeeans gathered around the courthouse and jail, summoned by Booth's shouts and the ringing of churchbells. The Racine delegation arrived late in the afternoon with arrest warrants for Garland and the U.S. Marshal, adding to the furor. Booth and his associates obtained a writ of habeas corpus from a local judge and called on the U.S. Marshal and federal judge to observe the writ, or at least allow Glover to receive legal counsel and medical care before Monday. The requests were denied. The local sheriff also refused to release Glover, deferring to federal jurisdiction.

The crowd was undaunted. Several “strong and resolute men” grabbed a large timber and used it as a battering ram to shatter the jailhouse door. When Glover emerged from inside, the mob rushed him down Jefferson or Jackson Street to Wisconsin Avenue, and thence down Water Street to the Walker's Point bridge. At the bridge, they met John Messenger, a Milwaukee doctor turned real estate developer, who inquired as to the cause for all the commotion. On being told what had happened, he immediately responded “put that man in my buggy,” and Glover left Talossan territory. Messenger took him by a meandering route (to throw off federal pursuit) to an abolitionist friend in Waukesha, and Glover was spirited from there back to Racine, and then put on a steamboat across the Talossan Sea to Canada, where he finally settled in peace and freedom.

For his part in Joshua Glover's rescue, Sherman Booth was arrested and charged with violating the Fugitive Slave Act. During his trial, he denied having personally participated in the rescue, but declared his support for the action, stating:

I am frank to say, and the prosecution may make the most of it, that I sympathize with the rescuers of Glover and rejoice at his escape. I rejoice that, in the first attempt of the slave-hunters to convert our jail into a slave-pen and our citizens into slave-catchers, they have signally failed, and that it has been decided by the spontaneous uprising and sovereign voice of the people, that no human being can be dragged into bondage in Milwaukee.

Booth was convicted in federal court, but his counsel, Milwaukee attorney Byron Paine, sought habeas corpus review in the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In an opinion by Justice Abram Smith (another Milwaukee attorney), that court ordered Booth freed and declared that the (cont'd on 6) (cont'd from 4) Fugitive Slave Act, “a wicked and cruel enactment,” was also unconstitutional. But that decision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, and Booth was imprisoned again (this time in the federal custom house in Milwaukee, where state officials could not interfere). Booth himself escaped from prison (after eight unsuccessful attempts) with the help of a group of sympathizers, but was soon recaptured, and remained in prison thereafter until his unpaid fines were remitted by President James Buchanan, shortly before the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.

The capture and rescue of Joshua Glover was a powerful stimulant for the growth and organization of the abolitionist movement in Wisconsin. Just nine days after his rescue, on 20 March 1854, a meeting of the citizens of Ripon, Wisconsin resolved to form a new anti-slavery political party under the name “Republican.” In early April, a convention was held at Young's Hall in Milwaukee (at the corner of Broadway and Wisconsin in Fiova Province) to discuss the formation of a “state league” against slave-catchers. But ultimate resolution of the slavery issue would require nothing less than civil war--an eventuality foreshadowed by Justice Smith in his decision holding the Fugitive Slave Act unconstitutional:

What, then, is to be done? Let the free states return to their duty, if they have departed from it, and be faithful to the compact, in the true spirit in which it was conceived and adopted. Let the slave states be content with such an execution of the compact as the framers of it contemplated. Let the federal government return to the exercise of the just powers conferred by the constitution, and few, very few, will be found to disturb the tranquility of the nation, or to oppose, by word or deed, the due execution of the laws. But until this is done, I solemnly believe that there will be no peace for the state or the nation, but that agitation, acrimony and hostility will mark our progress, even if we escape a more dread calamity, which I will not even mention.